Sometimes I think it must be a profoundly sad thing to be a human being.

My husband told me about something he learned about life once, I think from watching The Sopranos.

He said that humanity is all one big storm, all together we’re roiling clouds and flashes of light; to understand what it means to be a person, you should picture millions of little tornadoes reaching down to touch the earth.

That’s why we’re always holding our babies close; that’s why we hug our lovers, probe for ways to get inside of them and let them inside of ourselves.

Somewhere in the sky, we know each other.

When we’re born, we’re a tiny tornado and when we die, we turn back into the storm.

We don’t go away. We don’t go away lonely.

We are so lonely while we live that we press our darlings against us, breathe them and need their humidity.

I wasn’t sleeping last night, not really.

I didn’t want to be bothered, either.

My husband and I can become very far apart, so that I feel like an ocean of space, filled with toys and rides in the car and closed wounds like scars, lies between us. He wanted to watch football, but I asked him to come to bed. I curled against him, this person who used to be mine, who used to belong to me, somehow.

There has always been a place on his collarbone where my face fits; I wanted him to be still so that I could clumsily fit myself into all of his spaces.

I half-slept and dreamed that we were twenty years old, again.

I remembered what it felt like to be young and to not be alone, to not be a singular thing touching down to cold earth anymore, for a moment. I remembered when I recognized him as the thing that would keep me warm and wet, that would help me to be brave enough to live as myself.

I let myself remember that, how we pushed and pulled the same air with our love.

When people want to die, it isn’t because life doesn’t have meaning. People want to die when nobody wants to be inside of them.

Sometimes, these people are actually lonely. Sometimes they’re filthy; sometimes they do bad things that nobody else should touch. Sometimes they only feel that way.

I think about how we build these little homes. We live in them and leave them at some point. When we do, someone else will move their lives in and settle down in the dark together, in the space where we slept and cried and bled.

Dear, lonely little animals clinging to one another, because it’s all we can do.

That’s why we need our mommy; that’s why we need to let her go. It is because she will leave before we are ready.

That is why people forgive their fathers when they shouldn’t.

I was lonely as a girl; some of that loneliness became me, so that I’ll be in a small space with all my love piled around me and I feel like a ghost.

Sometimes I feel that being alive is a deliriously wonderful thing.

We’ll all return to the storm.

We’ll all be back together someday.

Amanda King is a Pittsburgh mommy of two beautiful Super Girls. She is married to the world’s sexiest accountant and they’re all sure to live happily ever after. While not frantically writing stories and searching for the perfect literary agent, she can be found over-sharing on her blog at Last Mom On Earth. Follow her on Twitter.

 

 

 

 

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Ed: Bryonie Wise